Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Erik Satie.

Article Excerpt
By Mary E. Davis. (Critical Lives Series.) London: Reaktion Books, 2007. [176 p. ISBN-10 1861893213; ISBN-13 978-1-86189-321-5. $16.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography.

Erik Satie has often been recognized more for succinct, jocular compositions that parody Debussian impressionism than for his seminal role in the development of French modernism. With the 1988 publication of Satie's correspondence by Ornella Volta (Satie Seen Through his Letters, translated by Michael Bullock [London: Boyars, 1989]), as well as later major studies by Alan M. Gillmor {Erik Satie [New York: Norton, 1992]), Robert Orledge (Satie the Composer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]), and Steven Moore Whiting (Satie the Bohemian [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998]), his status has grown considerably in recent years. Davis continues this trend with her entry in Reaktion Books' Critical Lives series, a group of concise volumes devoted to modernist icons including Foucault, Kafka, Picasso, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Erik Satie is the first to feature a composer.

Like Gillmor, Davis favors a chronological approach. The introductory chapter explores Satie's position as an antidote to the complexity of post-World War II composers such as Boulez. She also identifies ways that Satie frequently changed his public image to "project a variety of carefully cultivated public personas" (p. 12). The links between Satie's appearance and his artistic work is a common theme throughout the book, which is hardly surprising given that much of Davis's recent work...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!